The shoes are dropping. Have already dropped. The thuds you hear are the sounds of a pipeline being built.

They’ve landed one after the other in quick succession. There was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s trade junket to China. There was his backing of the province’s Site C dam — quid pro quo, Madame Premier. There was Trudeau’s announcement of a national carbon pricing plan. There was Ian Anderson, CEO of Kinder Morgan Canada, expressing his confidence that his company’s Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion will be built. There has been the ongoing pas de deux — choreographed, I’d say — between a coy provincial government insisting for the last five years it would only give in on the promise that safeguards would be put in place to protect its virginal shores, and a federal government that, wanting its way, avowed that its intentions were honourable and announced two weeks ago a $1.5-billion ocean clean-up plan as evidence of that. The provincial government expressed its gratitude. Both danced around the inevitability of their common agendas.

We’ve had warning long before this, at least, from Trudeau, at any rate. In a September article, Tyee columnist Bill Tieleman pointed out the Prime Minister had stated his preference for a Kinder Morgan pipeline as early as January 2014, when still an MP and leader of the Liberal Party. Trudeau said, as Tieleman quoted him: “I am, however, very interested in the Kinder Morgan pipeline, the Trans Mountain pipeline that is making its way through (government consideration). I certainly hope that we’re going to be able to get that pipeline approved.”

In contrast, Trudeau has always made clear his opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline, and his preference for the Trans Mountain route can hardly be made any clearer than the statement above. As for local sensitivities about the shipment of Alberta bitumen through Vancouver harbour, he pointedly did a boat tour of the harbour during a campaign stop here in May 2015. It wasn’t to announce his undying opposition to a seven-fold increase in oil tankers through it.

(Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi) scolded us for putting narrow regional concerns above the national interest … as opposed to Calgary’s concerns, or Alberta’s concerns, which are, of course, not narrow

I attended. Despite his public opposition to Northern Gateway, all he would say was that it was not the federal government’s job to be a “cheerleader” for any one project, but to be a “referee” — which was an odd statement, given the setting in which he chose to say it, and his own previously stated preference. After his tour, when he came ashore, rather than speak to his own interest in Trans Mountain, he announced dockside that a Liberal government would reinstate the local Coast Guard station and commit to a reinvestment in oil-spill response capacity on the coast — both of which have come true. Would British Columbians, I asked him then, have cause to worry that we might have to use those reinvestments here in Vancouver harbour because of a possible bitumen spill? He wouldn’t say, but rather answered in vague generalities that gave nothing away. You could hear a shoe drop.

As it always has, the pipeline defines the tension between the concerns of British Columbians and, in opposition, the “national interest,” which is brought up whenever someone — a politician, an oil worker or anyone living, say, between the borders of B.C. and Saskatchewan — wishes to characterize our anxiety over our environment as parochial and selfish. The latest was Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, famed Uber troll, who came to town for a meeting with the editorial boards of The Sun and Province on Thursday, during which he scolded us for putting narrow regional concerns above the national interest … as opposed to Calgary’s concerns, or Alberta’s concerns, which are, of course, not narrow.

“I don’t think anybody,” Nenshi said, referring to our local municipalities, “has the veto (on the pipeline’s approval) or anybody has the trump.” (An unfortunate choice of word, considering.) “I would argue that in this case, science should have the trump.”

OK, let it. Science says a herd of 60,000 reindeer in Siberia starved to death this year because freakish winter rainfall froze over the snow and made it impossible for the animals to scrape through to forage. Science says 2015 was the warmest year on record, Arctic temperatures are 20 degrees Celsius above normal this year and sea ice is at a new low. Science says the sky is actually falling because rising levels of carbon dioxide have cooled the stratosphere and led to the shrinkage of the atmosphere.

But so what? For every point science might make, the pragmatists, the deniers, the gradualists, the ones who point out the obvious contradictions we all live with as members of a modern society as reason to do nothing, provide a counterweight that immobilizes us. It’s the state of stasis we’ve reached, while Nature hasn’t. It’s business as usual.

This column was written on a computer whose manufacture was made possible by oil. Whether that fact makes this column a typical expression of liberal hypocrisy and narrow parochial interest, or a suicide note, hardly matters which.

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